Looking Back What Did We Do Well? Dr Norman Swan

by | Coronavirus - COVID-19

Looking back

What Australia did right was lockdown properly. We did it right in the first wave so that we could get our act together.

We could get our contact tracing and our testing regime going so that we could test properly and we could find and trace people who’ve been infected. And we locked down completely. We didn’t mess around with it. And we didn’t do half-hearted measures. And we did it for long enough where we got infection spread almost down to zero. So that’s what we did well, we locked down.

And in fact, locking down, social distancing, keeping away from other people is the only thing you can do in this pandemic. And you can see from what they’ve done in Europe where they’ve of course done this half-heartedly, they’re on, they’re off, they’re doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that. That is absolutely the wrong thing to do. We’ve done the right thing. We’ve locked down and we’ve put in place a really good contact-tracing system.

Yes, there was a major blip in Victoria, but that’s come good now.

Dr Norman Swan, Physician and Journalist